Tokyo Trash Baby – Tokyo gomi onna (2000)

Directed by: Ryuichi Hiroki | 88 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Mami Nakamura, Kazuma Suzuki, Kou Shibasaki, Sayuri Oyamada, Tomorowo Taguchi, Masahiro Toda

Ryuichi Hiroki seems to have a thing for protagonists who find it frightening to live their own lives and expose themselves in this. These characters then internalize this life by throwing themselves into an obsession. In Hiroki’s ‘I Am an S&M Writer’ the writer’s wife already said that her husband was not practical enough: he lived everything through his erotic novels, but did not know how to deal with his own wife. In Girlfriend, the photographer’s life was channeled and shielded by her camera, to the point that she had to point the observing lens on herself. In ‘Tokyo Trash Baby’ we have to deal with a girl who is secretly in love with a boy in her apartment building, but does not have the courage to actually approach him. She lives her own life through the imagined, constructed life of his; however, not by writing stories or shooting pictures, but by searching through his garbage bags.

‘Tokyo Trash Baby’, together with Takashi Miike’s ‘Visitor Q’, is part of the “Love Cinema” series, all films shot on DV. The film marks a turning point in Hiroki’s oeuvre: it is the first film for which he made frequent use of close-up, where he previously mainly used long shots. Whether the reason for this change is substantive or technical, it in any case brings the viewer very close to the world of Miyuki (Mami Nakamura), which increases sympathy for this character. Like no other, Hiroki knows how to elicit exceptional performances from his female protagonists, who know and dare to give an intimate and vulnerable image of their character.

Although Miyuki’s behavior is quite bizarre, she still gets close to the viewer. On the one hand because of the patient camera work, which observes her actions with sympathy and interest, and on the other hand because of the excellent acting of Miyuki, whose intrigued eyes make the viewer search for her fantasies. In addition, it also makes a difference that she is a beautiful young woman and not a dirty old lady, which we would rather imagine when we hear of a person who searches garbage. It is this contrast between her beauty and otherwise neat appearance and her fascination with garbage, or rather the garbage of flatmate Yoshinori (Kazuma Suzuki), that partly keeps the viewer so fascinated. Going through the garbage is a ritual like writing in a diary and that’s how Miyuki handles it too. She takes Yoshinori’s bag inside every day, and carefully fluffs it out, sitting cross-legged, dressed in her underwear. Through the contents of these garbage bags, Miyuki gets an impression of Yoshinori’s life, and she dreams herself in this life. She hangs his discarded photos on the wall, then pastes her own image over that of a friend, whom he is embracing in the photo, for example. She then goes into a photo booth and poses in exactly the same way as the girlfriend, just to be able to fit in, believably enough, literally and figuratively. She will also smoke the same brand of cigarettes and eat cornflakes. She wants to model herself exactly like Yoshinori’s wishes, which prompts her to reorder a magazine in order to retrieve the page he cut from it. At one point she has grown so much that she convinces Yoshinori’s (ex-)girlfriend to live with him, citing as proof any clothing, cosmetics, or foodstuffs that she wears or uses; clearly all on his advice, she says.

It’s all quite disturbing, but Nakamura’s dreamy acting and her essentially sympathetic character make it endearing too. When she finally dares to meet Yoshinori in person and, after a success, it ends in disappointment because she herself is confronted with her bizarre obsession, we sincerely feel for her. With a subject like this, an underlying critique of the consumer society is obvious, but it never gets too heavy. How fleetingly we undergo life – like Yoshinori with his many flings – and how much of life we ​​throw away and can (or should?) reconstruct from the remains, ultimately remains in the middle. That not everything is ready for the garbage bag seems to be a conclusion in any case. At the end of the film, there is at least one thing from Yoshinori’s garbage bags that Miyuki will never throw away. The viewer can decide for themselves what this is.